"Founders" film should be mandatory viewing for female athletes

The WNBA, the league for women’s basketball in this country, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. That league started play in 1997 and celebrates its longevity and its success as a pro sports league for women.

That’s fine, but if any of the players in the WNBA have a chance to see “The Founders,” the documentary on the founding of the LPGA in 1950, the basketball players might understand just how good they have had it. After all, while the road on the WNBA has not been smooth, WNBA players had a chance to go to college on scholarships, had the power and the money of the NBA behind their league and had television coverage from the first year they played.

The 13 founding members of the 1950 class of the LPGA had, well, nothing but themselves. That’s a message that comes through loud and clear in the strong documentary that had a screening in Rancho Mirage on Monday night.

Produced by Atlanta-based Mighty Fine Pictures and co-directed by Charlene Fish and Carrie Schrader, the documentary tells the story of how the LPGA came into existence and how it struggled in its early years with no money, no promotional vehicles except themselves and no real standing in the golf world.

But more importantly, the documentary reveals the stories of the 13 founders, including the four who were alive when production began. Two of those surviving founders, Marlene Hagge-Vossler and Shirley Spork, live in the desert, and Spork was on hand for a question-and-answer session with Fisk after Monday’s screening.

The film features interviews with the surviving founders as well as players like Annika Sorenstam, Nancy Lopez, Patty Sheehan and two players who served as executive producers of the film, Karrie Webb and Stacy Lewis.

Through those interviews, whatever archival footage and photos that were available and even some re-creations of early events in the golfers’ lives, “The Founders” talks about the importance of Olympic gold-medalist Babe Didrikson Zaharias to the formation of the LPGA, how Zaharias, Patty Berg and Louise Suggs formed a kind of Big Three for the early years of the tour and how Suggs and Zaharias engaged in a personality battle that Suggs held on to until she died in 2015, 50 years after Zaharias’ death.

But it also talks about the camaraderie and the difficulties of trying to be a women professional in the 1950s when the sports world was dominated by men and when women were supposed to be mothers and homemakers.

The film also touches on the very real idea that what the 13 founders did in 1950 helped usher in an acceptance of females as athletes. Athletes like tennis players, track and field athletes and, yes, even WNBA players could easily trace their ability to compete and participate back to the early days of the LPGA.

The documentary remains in limited release but will soon be available on DVD and on demand, and the producers have signed a deal to start showing the film on Golf Channel in 2018. That’s good, because every golfer ought to at least have some idea of idea what it took for the LPGA to get off the ground.

But more important, every female athlete in this country, from accomplished high-paid all-star to high school athlete, needs to see this film to have an understanding of just how far female sports have come in this country, and how much further female athletes have to go.

Larry Bohannan is The Desert Sun golf writer. He can be reached at (760) 778-4633 or larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @Larry_Bohannan.

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A documentary abouu the founders of the LPGA was shown in Rancho Mirage Minday
Larry Bohannan/Desert Sun